"Patches welcome" means "Shut up!"

Posted Nov 15, 2024 14:35 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: "Patches welcome" means "Shut up!" by anton
Parent article: Progress on toolchain security features

> Certainly. And, as I wrote, some gcc maintainer found the time to recognize the "b<b-1" idiom, and found the time to transform it into longer code even when gcc is invoked with -Os. So what makes you think that submitting a patch that reverts that change would achieve anything remotely productive or useful?

Because there may be very good intentional reasons for that change in GCC? Or maybe this is an unintentional side effect of some other fix/improvement and can itself be fixed incrementally with sufficient elbow grease?

(I can say from experience that micro-optimizations like that rarely make a meaningful difference in code size/performance. Unless you're at the point of truly counting/shaving bytes, in which case you are going to have a real budget to throw at this)

> You think that I should provide a patch for a project maintained by people who will ignore the patch because their priorities differ from mine? Why should that be remotely productive or useful?

You would create the patch because it makes things that much better for *you*. Sharing/pushing it upstream is entirely optional.

> You think I should provide funding or advocacy for a project where the maintainers' priorities differ from mine? I can see that the gcc maintainers would like that, but why should I?

I meant advocate for *your* use case/problems, not advocate for the project in general. (And "advocate" means "persuade the audience", not "crap all over them")

But in a more general sense, very little out there is ever fully aligned with one's personal priorities. Welcome to life.

> In that case, what did you want to say with "patches welcome"? As used by you it apparently means "I don't like what you are writing and I wish you would shut up, so I suggest a wild-goose chase". Your last paragraph makes that even clearer.

...You're the one expecting other folks to care about and perform (potentially very specialized) work on your behalf because *someone else* is paying them to work on other use cases. That's some pretty serious entitlement.

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"Patches welcome" means "Shut up!"

Posted Nov 15, 2024 18:41 UTC (Fri) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link] (1 responses)

I can say from experience that micro-optimizations like that rarely make a meaningful difference in code size/performance.

In that case, why have they made the change at all? Or many other changes? The usual claim is that each transformation by itself rarely makes any meaningful difference, but they add a whole lot of them, and together they usually result in smaller/faster code. And it's certain that you cannot generate smaller code by compiling an individual idiom into larger code.

You would create the patch because it makes things that much better for *you*. Sharing/pushing it upstream is entirely optional.

I would not know how. I distribute free software, i.e., as source code. How would a patch that only I use make things better for me, much less "much better"? Because I can then answer bug reports with "works for me"? That's not how I prefer to work.

You're the one expecting other folks to care about and perform (potentially very specialized) work on your behalf because *someone else* is paying them to work on other use cases.

What makes you think so? Concerning gcc, I have mostly given up on the idea that they feel bound by the social contract where users find and report bugs and gcc maintainers fix them, so no, I don't expect them to do anything, and therefore I have mostly stopped reporting gcc bugs.

Concerning people who pay them, I doubt that Intel pays for gcc development with the intention that they implement transformations that make the code longer when using -Os.

"Patches welcome" means "Shut up!"

Posted Nov 16, 2024 10:46 UTC (Sat) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link]

As a nowadays inactive maintainer of a small corner of gcc, and speaking only for myself, largely I agree with what "pizza" has said in this subthread. GCC is a large project with a lot of stakeholders, and nobody gets exactly what they want. Those who put in more, be it in terms of funding developers, or individual contributors putting in elbow grease to scratch their own itches, get out more than those who contribute less.

For some specific points you made:

> In that case, why have they made the change at all? Or many other changes? The usual claim is that each transformation by itself rarely makes any meaningful difference, but they add a whole lot of them, and together they usually result in smaller/faster code. And it's certain that you cannot generate smaller code by compiling an individual idiom into larger code.

Nobody intentionally pessimizes code, unless it's to fix some correctness issue. There's obviously no conspiracy against people with passionate opinions about generating optimal code for "b < b - 1". Without looking into specifics, my guess would be that this is an unintentional side-effect of some other work, and the effect it caused was insignificant in size/performance on the benchmark suites that are used to track the development of the compiler, mainly SPECcpu, but also other similar application benchmarks. Those are ultimately what people tend to care about, not some particular micro-optimization (unless that particular micro-optimization affects the size and/or performance of some larger application).

That is not to say micro-optimizations aren't useful; they certainly are used for analyzing the impact of some particular optimization passes etc. But again, ultimately what matters to users is the size/performance of complete applications. In some cases it can mean a code transformation that pessimizes some particular aspect (like generating optimal code for "b < b - 1") but makes some other code faster, for an ultimately positive result on SPEC, gets merged.

> Concerning gcc, I have mostly given up on the idea that they feel bound by the social contract where users find and report bugs and gcc maintainers fix them, so no, I don't expect them to do anything, and therefore I have mostly stopped reporting gcc bugs.

Like so many other projects, GCC has many more bug reports than it has developers able to fix them. Thus bugs have to be triaged, and if it so happens that your favourite bug isn't considered important enough to get the attention of the very limited developer time, then unfortunately it means it will languish. If you're unable to convince the developers that your bug is very important and needs attention, then other ways around that conundrum are to fix it yourself or pay someone to do it, hence 'patches welcome'. To the extent that can be construed as "Shut up!", it's pointing out that complaining about poor code generation on comp.arch, lwn, or some other forum, fun as it may be as a way to pass your free time, is unlikely to cause other people to step up and fix your issue.

> Concerning people who pay them, I doubt that Intel pays for gcc development with the intention that they implement transformations that make the code longer when using -Os.

Very true, but it's also likely true that out of the near infinite ways the compiler can be improved, Intel doesn't consider generating optimal code for "b < b - 1" to be particularly high on the list of priorities.